No boy can now enter the Army or the Civil Service until he has proved by an examination before government examiners, not only that his parents have paid for a good education for him, but that he has profited by it. The standard of education which has been erected by the Civil Service Commissioners and the Board of Military Education, is, indeed, a low one; but it has been constructed by the advice and with the concurrence of the masters of our largest schools, it is firmly based upon public opinion, and it is far more likely to be heightened than to be reduced. And there it will henceforward remain—a sure though not a severe test of the honesty and abilities of masters as well as of scholars. From a youth of seventeen or eighteen years of age it requires but little, but it insists that that little shall be well and thoroughly learnt. A correct knowledge of his mother tongue and of arithmetic, a fair acquaintance with history, geography, mathematics, and French, as well as with Latin and with Greek, if the candidate volunteers the latter, is all that is asked; and if an upper-class school does not teach that much to a boy between the age of twelve and eighteen, it is not unreasonable to inquire what it does teach him? But these are just the educational items which Harchester has hitherto evaded teaching. They are not yet part of the Harchester “school business;” the sooner they are, the better for the future prosperity of Harchester. As matters now stand, what happens to a Harchester boy the moment he receives the promise of a commission or a clerkship, is just this: he is hastily removed from that celebrated school, and is handed over to “a crammer”—an educational empiric—who can have no pride in his calling; who deals only with full-grown and avowed dunces; and who undertakes to teach them in a few months what it is shameful to their teachers that they should not have learnt years before. The “crammer” teaches at a manifest disadvantage; he and his pupil are strangers to each other; he knows nothing of his constitution, his disposition, his capacity, or his temper; he has, and can have, no influence or control over him; all he can do, all he undertakes to do, is to hustle him, by fair means or by foul, over the low educational barrier which debars the youth from entering the profession of his choice. Sometimes he succeeds—generally after one or two mortifying failures; but very often the poor lad has been allowed to become so incurably idle as to be unable to acquire at eighteen those rudimentary parts of education, which ought to have been imparted to him when he was a child, and in which the sons of his father’s tradesmen are now mostly proficient; and he is in consequence shut out from the career to which he and his parents have for years been looking forward with eager satisfaction. In either case his friends are unfairly exposed to great expense, anxiety, and mortification. And all